Shadows and Highlights

There are many varieties and that's what I like. Some are like the deepest shadows, some like the most blown-out highlights, some everything else in between.

He is a seasoned shooter. He asks me to stand in the orange rays of the early morning sun before he can shoot me. The light is good, he says. I find it amusing, why he wants to shoot a mundane shot when there is so much happening around. But I like the curiosity in his approach. It can very well be, he's running out of ideas for the moment and isn't seeing. Or just warming up.

Another takes a quick shot; "makes" is the word he uses. It's a boy reading a newspaper and goats crowded around as if interested in the news too. "News for all" he says, rather amused and satisfied. His photos are never complete without a good title. I like the shot.

The third runs his mind through the possible list of alternatives, perspectives and choses the one that looks the most unique. He is sharp and his mind flexible, as if well exercised. I like the results too. But the environment is infiltrated with photographers as well as subjects. Both affect the environment as they affect his shots.

The fourth, a storyteller talks about shooters with long lenses whose main objective is to capture the colour of sunlight perfectly upon an outstretched finger of an old man praying by the river. These kinds are so obsessed with precision in little things, that they are blind to the symphony of the life that walks silently by. I have seen this kind too, for whom each pixel in a frame is to be separately catered to, individually treated and reproduced in such a way that the picture, (a sum of all the little parts) ceases to make much sense any more. The storyteller, on the other hand tells you stories to capture your reactions. That is interesting.

Then there's another kind, who go "Quack, quack, quack!" Noise fills the air, no one understands them. Ducks are yet to learn languages humans speak.


I was looking through photos by Garry Winogrand and enjoyed them as much as I like Cartier-Bresson. Here's a good, though oft repeated quote from him:

"I don't have anything to say in any picture. My only interest in photography is to see what something looks like as a photograph. I have no preconceptions."

And yet if one sees his photographs they evoke much feeling, tell many stories, and importantly, they make you pause for a while. I don't think it's ironical at all.